"Professor Chris Ashford and senior lecturer, Nicola Wake have been awarded funding from the Modern Law Review to run a seminar on ‘Consent, Compulsion and Sexual Offenders: The Compulsory Treatment of Sex Offenders’ to be held in March 2014.

This is only the second time this award has gone to a new university, the first time also being Northumbria in 2010 for a seminar on Expert Evidence in Criminal Proceedings.

This event will be run jointly by the School’s Centre for Evidence and Criminal Justice Studies and the Gender, Sexuality and Law Research Group. It aims to bring a new dimension to the approach of legal academics and legal practitioners to the “treatment” of sex offenders. It will bring together academics and practitioners for the first time to enable an inter-disciplinary dialogue on this topical area of criminal law and to develop a sustainable international research network.

The Gender, Sexuality and Law Research group was launched in 2013. It draws together established, early career academics and postgraduate students from a range of disciplines across the University aligned with the core theme of gender, sexuality and law. The group acts a point of focus for this growing community of scholars, and organizes a seminar series together with a range of activities to support and develop a community of academic inquiry. In the first six months of operation, the group has successfully attracted funding to explore LGBTQ law student identities, LGBTQ ‘communities’ within law schools (with Bradford University), and to explore conceptions of privacy in the context of mobile ‘dating’ Apps such as the popular Grindr and Scruff products (with Newcastle University).

For more info on the seminar or the work of the Gender, Sexuality and the Law Research Group, contact Chris Ashford"